Competing Choreographies of the Postcolonial Plantation: Planter’s Pageantry Meets Sistren Collective’s Sweet Sugar Rage

Abstract

This essay examines the 1985 documentary film, Sweet Sugar Rage (co-directed by Honor Ford-Smith and Harclyde Walcott), and its methodologies of renewable resistance to the enduring choreographies of planter's pageantry in the postcolonial Caribbean. Produced by Jamaica's Sistren Theatre Collective – a radical community theatre group formed in 1977 – the film (the collective's first) documents a set of dramatic interventions focused on women's labour exploitation in Jamaica's sugar cane fields. A series of workshops and plays depicts the historical and current material conditions of cane workers and aims to support participants in the practical navigation of plantation labour. In staging the material conditions of post-independence Jamaican plantation labour, including the gendered hierarchies of union organising, these counter-choreographies of workers' solidarity re-occupy the cane field as a historically dense site of collective resistance. Furthermore, I argue, in their rejection of the ubiquitous and insidious staging of the plantation as an ahistorical, hyper-aestheticised dreamscape of leisure and play, these local counter-choreographies intervene on the scale of global history. The essay articulates the stakes of this refusal by historicising the installation of plantation heritage tourism as a nostalgic site of planter's pageantry that continues to erase the violent legacies of enslaved and indentured labour into the present day. Engaging the aesthetic and political consequences of these competing choreographies, the essay looks towards the future of the Caribbean as a global proscenium of postcolonial possibility.